Today the KDE project previewed a new technology that allows arbitrary KPart-based KDE applications to be embedded into Mozilla's FireFox. Thus, KDE applications can soon be used to show rich content such as PDF files using KPDF or display multimedia files with KMPlayer or Kaffeine.

KPDF inside Firefox

"Once again, KParts has proven to be a flexible component technology that makes development easy even when dealing with non-KDE applications", said Tobias König, author of the KPart-Firefox integration.

As the code was created on the KDE booth at LinuxTag, it is not yet in the KDE repository. However König, best known as the author of KAddressbook, is planning to check in the code soon.

I like Konqueror interfac more than Firefox, as I do like KDE more than gnome/gtk, but konqueror engine is still a child in front of gecko.
So if the gecko into konqueror makes on kde 3.5 with kpaers embeded on it...WOW, it will make me happy ;)

A Gecko kpart will never be part of KDE since that would currently introduce a dependency on a complete Mozilla/Firefox installation (for that matter the Mozilla Foundation really needs to get their act together finally and release an unified Gecko runtime environment for all their products).

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you compile KDE with or without it (by configure script detecting it), and then, the binaries simply detect if Mozilla libraries are present on the system or not, if it was compile with support to it?

Something like when you run a program that uses vbrun300.dll, but just fo0r some minor part, so it can run without it also?

...is that the tool-bars always "refuse" to stay where I want them. I always change its tool-bar to look like that of Firefox by moving items from one toolbar to another and merging those that I have to....this works for very few times before everything begins to be placed anywhere. This wastes valuable screen estate and makes Konqueror even ugly! It has been the case in all distros I have used. How does one solve this?

To make matters worse, attempting to re-arrange them results in nothing at all! Re-merging will not work at this point.

no, what he says is correct. I've always experienced the exactly same problem my distro since I remember.
It's a headache!
Tool bar management in Konqueror is due to a revision, I think.

Another thing I'd like changed (or better, implemented) is an option to independently configure the double click behaviour on File Types when in the File Management and Web Browser modes of Konqueror. This is another cause of frustration for my daily usage.

I have always saved my sessions - ALWAYS. What frustrates me most is the fact that attempting to redo the whole exercise again will NOT work once the toolbars "forget" their settings. But I must add that sometimes, Konqueror will remember these setings magically. Filing a bug report is not very useful because reproducing the behavior is almost impossible.

My trouble with konqui is that some images always fail to load on a page ... or the stylesheet does not seem to have applied. I am on a fairly snappy broadband so I wonder what the issue is? Even kde-look.org does not load without some images 'broken' (which in reality exist)!

Oh btw, I am using KDE 3.5 on Kubuntu although I have seen the same behaviour on PCLinuxOS, Fedora etc.

This is feature I would really like to see with Firefox. KDE-Wallet is more advanced then the integrated password-mananger. Also it would be helpful, since I am using both browsers, so I would only have to type in the password once.

No, he wants a centralized place to store password on his machine so that he doesn't have to remember which of several different passwords he used on each website. And he wants to be able to use that whether he's in Firefox or Konqueror.

Firefox already has dialogs that ask if you want them to remember your password all over the place, but it can't share that information with KDE apps.

Well, normally I would say yes. But when an app becomes as important and popular as firefox, sometimes it switches who has to do the work to make things work together. Or both sides can say it's the other guy's job and I can be posting this note 20 months later, of course.

Simply having KDE wallet be able to fill in Firefox's master password would be enough, since right now FF asks for that every time you run it, and it does sometimes crash, so that can be several times a day. Truth is the firefox password manager does far more password management for me than KDE wallet does, so if KDE wallet wants more adoption, it could very well fall to the platform to do the work rather than the app. So it goes.

I really like the kde wallet for its security, portability, and ease of use and I would like to see a Firefox plugin to support it. I'm surprised no motivated individual has done this yet. I'm guessing the KDE Wallet has a nice simple API to access it and request logins and passwords from it when needed.

Wouldn't it involve not too much more than substituting the KDE Wallet for the back end of Firefox's login/password storage system?

No that would not do it, since Firefox does not give a damn about the kde wallet manager. So it would not make any difference if the kde wallet could enter FF's master password, because the wallet is not being asked when you browse to a password site using FF. Also, these people who are asking for a wallet integration into FF want to have a centralized place to store their password, which I personally completely agree with. Your suggestion does not do that. And btw you wouldn't say that the centralized place to store passwords in a K desktop should be the FF password manager, would you?? It is NOT KDE's job to adapt.

It seems like people are too caught up in this whole 'whose job is it?!?' question. What I think is: there is NO ONE you could say 'that is their job' to concerning this matter. A centralized place for passwords would be very nice indeed, but since the KDE development does not seem to be aware of this, perhaps some other hobby programmer would have to do it. I presume this would be possible with yet another FF plugin similar to those other ones floating in dozens around in the net.
I really would love to try it myself, but unfortunately my programming abilities are very limited...

This doesn't solve the most annoying problem, namely that the file selector in Firefox is still not integrated into KDE and Firefox can't do things like:
Browse Floppies
Browse Network files with fish:/, smb:/, etc
Browse Storage Media

So I can't "Save As" a page to a location outside of the root file system (like a currently unmounted Floppy, Network Location, or Storage Media).

Not to say that the KDE Open File dialog is perfect, but it's better than what GNOME has to offer. One thing that the KDE file dialog still lacks is a "Rename" option when a person right clicks a file (although it is possible to rename the file by choosing "Properties"). Not very user-friendly.

If there's one thing I love about Windows is that all applications' File-Open dialogs are the same and can do everything that File Explorer can. And File Explorer shows *everything* (Network, CD, Floppy, Local Folders) as nodes in a well thought-out Tree View.

Partly agree. Windows open/save dialog is cool because you can even
copy, paste, etc in that dialog. But I like KDE's dialog because
of the left-hand customizable icon bar and because it saves its size
so you can make it nearly full screen. I dont want to see other content
anyway when I'm about to select a file. Never understood why that dialog
uses to be so small on Windows. And, of course, you can seemlessly
browse/edit/etc FTP, SSH, etc. files. So, right now, that dialog nearly
does everything I want. But I agree, renaming via properties is really
a bit complicated.

as we know, kparts use LiveConnect extension to support Javascript Interactive in Konqueror.

so we can control the plugin in HTML and javascript code.
(kaffeine did not supply js support, kmplayer does，I had made a JS support for Kaffeine, it can support most of the JS functions as same as Windows Mediaplayer And Realplayer.)

but how about this implementation?

for more media plugin interface, pls view the Window Media player and RealPlayer plugin JS interface.

You say you've added js support to kaffeine, did you send that back upstream to the kaffeine maintainer? Reason I ask is this is vitally important to get certain sites working right (www.musicindiaonline.com and www.yahoo.com's new media streaming stuff are ones that I can think of atm as that is the number one bug that my company gets the most complaints about....)

this is something that firefox(and thunderbird) lacks...even within gnome envrionment.
Maybe they should start to support at least DBUS to connect other apps(like address books, or even other mozilla apps) without dirty hacks.
The file chooser dialog represents a major problem, because they need to support both KioSlaves and GnomeVFS, maybe if there will be a common solution mozilla will start to support it
Just my 2¢

Sorry, but I get most of the webs "active" content diplayable under linux just fine in firefox using the well known available plugins plus mplayer plugin.

On the other hand the nspluginviewer (sometimes plus konqueror) crashes all the time for me. Of course this is the fault of bad web authors, bad plugins and bad packagers of my distro - but it makes KDE just look bad, as firefox works well with the same content.

Hello,
I am a Linux (Fedora core 2) user - more specifically, I use KDE as my desktop. First let me congratulate you on bringing this long missed feature of integrating a pdf viewer with web browser which is standard in the windows counterpart.

Now coming to the issue of what is lacking in KPDF. I have found that Gpdf is more usable when viewing PDF documents (though it has crashed plenty of times) because of the following:

1) Kpdf does not recognise links (web links or internal links). Gpdf does.
2) Font rendering is not up to the mark. The documents opened in kpdf looks crude. Much better (antialiased?) font support is there for Gpdf.

... this may be because I am using a version of kpdf which was bundled with fedora core 2 (older version).

Though gpdf also has its drawbacks. I have found that some pdf documents created using openoffice.org, which when opened in gpdf are garbled, but opens fine in kpdf. But most of the time gpdf works.

I am sure these wrinkles will be sorted out in kpdf by the time KDE 4 is released.